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Chandrani Chatterjee188 Milind Malsheabout charming women, elegant buildings, luscious mangoes andfine wines, but not about the intellectual fermentation there.” 4Nearly all of Ghalib’s Urdu poems are in the ghazal formwhose themes are largely preserved by convention. The predominanttheme is love, either love for a mistress or for God. The frameworkof the Urdu poems was flexible enough to accommodate both thesecular and the divine. With respect to forms and themes Ghalibworked within the medieval tradition and his poetry was conditionedby his taste and education as by the contemporary aristocratic viewof poetry. He was devoted to the institutions, conventions andpractices of the medieval period, of the Mughal period, to be precise.According to Sisir Kumar Das, “The greatest singular contributionof Ghalib to Urdu literature in particular and Indian literature ingeneral, is his complete freedom from any kind of philosophicalscheme which had dominated Indian poetry for several centuries.His view of life was not that of a pagan …but it is free fromreligious inhibitions on the one hand and embraces life, on the other,both as joyous existence and as a dark and painful experience. Thedilemmas of existence, the tensions of desires, the contradiction ofthought, make his poetry rich and humane…” 5Let us examine a ghazal by Ghalib in this context1. aa, ki meree jaan ko qaraar naheen haitaaqat-e-bedaad-e-intazaar naheen hai[qaraar = rest/repose, bedaad = injustice ]2. dete hain jannat hayaat-e-dahar ke badlenashsha ba_andaaza-e-khummaar naheen hai[hayaat = life, dahar = world, ba_andaaza = according to,khummaar = intoxication]